Auto Suggestions are available once you type at least 3 letters. Use up arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+up arrow) and down arrow (for mozilla firefox browser alt+down arrow) to review and enter to select.

Overview

A breathtaking novella about faith and anarchy by the acclaimed and prizewinning Latin American writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa.

Mexican author Rubirosa is attending a book fair in Tangier when he reconnects with an old acquaintance, a Moroccan artist who asks one favor of his visiting friend: to access the puzzling files on a memory card. It could help fulfill the destiny of his son Abdelkrim. It could also unwittingly draw both men into irreversible events already in motion on distant shores.

In America, Abdelkrim, a brilliant aspiring astronaut deemed “too Muslim” for citizenship, has teamed up with an equally gifted young prodigy, a witness to the plight of Syrian refugees. Together, the foreign students share a vision of altering the world’s geopolitical landscape to end human suffering with a nearly inconceivable blueprint. And they can turn theory to reality. They can bring about change. But only through a technological apocalypse can there be redemption—by unleashing total chaos.

A provocative morality tale that moves with the visceral rhythms of a high-tech thriller, Chaos, A Fable is a spare and stunning triumph from one of the most celebrated Latin American authors of his generation.

ADVERTISEMENT

Product Details

About the Author

Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. He immigrated to New York in 1980, and in 1982 he moved to Morocco. American expatriate writer Paul Bowles, with whom Rey Rosa had been corresponding, translated his first three books into English. Rey Rosa has based many of his writings and stories on legends and myths indigenous to Latin America and North Africa. Of his many works, seven have been translated into English: The Beggar’s Knife, Dust on Her Tongue, The Pelcari Project, The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Severina, and now Chaos, A Fable. He currently lives in Guatemala City.

Editorial Reviews

2018-12-16

Guatemalan exile Rey Rosa (Dust on Her Tongue, 1992) borrows elements from his own life in a short novel of futuristic alienation.

On leaving his homeland, Rey Rosa immigrated to the U.S. but then departed for Morocco, where he came into the orbit of Paul Bowles, his first translator. Bowles turns up in this novel as John Field, "the American artist and critic who'd spent the last half of his life in Tangier." Field has befriended many people in his time, among them a Mexican writer who, many years after Field's death, is enlisted by old friend Mohammed Zhrouni to help him tell a story he has recorded on the now ancient medium of the cassette—but also to decipher the contents of a memory card. Tapes and card help provide a circumstantial portrait of Field and Mohammed but more of Mohammed's young son, Abdelkrim, a genius who—a crow tells Mohammed, for this is, after all, a fable—"has a special…destiny in store for him." Mohammed wonders if the crow said "spatial" instead of "special," and there's a reason for that. Abdelkrim, for his part, fulfills both prophecies, though in a way that is perhaps not very realistic—as noted, this is a fable, so that's to be forgiven—and that also pointedly criticizes the way in which Muslims are perceived in post-9/11 America. "Time does not exist," Rey Rosa repeatedly says, but yet it passes: Abdelkrim's dream to become an American and, more than that, an American astronaut is thwarted, but he manages to find his way into space anyway even as Field enters eternity "a week before the Americans brought down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad." Rey Rosa's story tackles questions of religion, anomie, and, ultimately, what the authorities would deem terrorism: Asked whether he has become an anarchist, Abdelkrim answers, "Antiarms more than anything else," for which he has just the remedy.

Allusive and metaphorical, with a nicely unpredictable close that offers a flicker of hope for humankind.

Clare Campbell has worked hard to create distance between herself and her troubled family. But
when she receives news of her parents’ murder, she’s forced to return to the quiet town of Clarkeston, Maine, to arrange their funeral and take ...

Humanity put all its fading hopes in New Eden, a pristine star system 230 light-years
from the ravaged Earth. But upon arrival, the would-be colonists encountered the Kresh—a diabolical alien race who quickly captured the human starship and tortured its ...

The award-winning, international bestselling page-turner about the secrets and lies of one man that lead
another into a treacherous house of strangers…When novelist Manuel Ortigosa learns that his husband, Álvaro, has been killed in a car crash, it comes as ...

For over five hundred years, humanity has sprawled across the galaxy, forming fractious empires and
deadly regions of lawless space. In the midst of brewing tensions, disgraced pilot Rex Vahl is tapped for a suicide mission: infiltrate an interplanetary power ...

Kathleen Flaherty doesn’t know what to expect when she accepts a position at Shea Crystal
in Ireland. A talented advertising copywriter, she seems to hit a stone wall with Connor O’Shea, the head of the glassworks. The handsome, Stanford educated ...

Even in a land of eternal twilight, secrets can’t stay hidden forever.Seventeen-year-old Eyelet Elsworth has
only one hope left: to find her late father’s most prized invention, the Illuminator. It’s been missing since the day a mysterious flash wiped the ...

Syndicated cartoonist Jessica Day has retreated to a cabin in California's High Sierra Mountains to
complete her past deadline comic strip. Much to her dismay, she discovers that mystery writer Cole Alexander has taken up temporary residence in the very ...